11 ms·

Taking on Google

137 points by rapnie 6y ago

cyberlab 6y ago
Plausible is great, and I see the need for it, but I've always enjoyed using AWStats instead, as there is no need to add third party code to my site. It all happens in the background and it paints a much better picture of your stats since users can't block the gathering of stats with an AD-Blocker.
- rkagerer 6y ago
  I've used AWStats for years. It's not perfect, but it's preferable to the scummy alternatives proffered by the big boys.
- marvinblum 6y ago
  That's one of the reasons I build Pirsch (https://pirsch.io/ https://pirsch.io/). All the JavaScript integrations can be blocked.
- not_knuth 6y ago
  How would you compare it to GoAcess [0]? I've only ever used GoAccess, but AWStats seems to be the older, more mature tool... so I would be curious about a comparison. [0] https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/
- ukutaht 6y ago
  Plausible developer here. Interesting you say that. There's no reason Plausible could not be used like AWStats. Parsing logs is just a different ingestion mechanism and we already provide self-hosting via Docker. On principle it wouldn't be too difficult to drain your logs into a Plausible instance or just run it on the same host along your web server. We ran a test last summer and found the stats from our JS-based tracker much much much more usable: https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis So this is why we haven't put too much effort in log analysis. The stats we got from AWStats were mostly bot traffic with no good way to get rid of them. Have you run AWStats and Plausible side-by-side? Do you not have ~90% bots in your logs?
  - alex0401 6y ago
    JS won't ever give you an accurate number (there's a growing army of people blocking JS & trackers). Logs will provide an accurate number, albeit you may not know if it's a 100% human.
0898 6y ago
Great to see Plausible on HackerNews. It's one of the few pieces of software (Stripe is one, Starling another) that I deeply enjoy using. I get a good feeling when I open it up. I don't really have the UX vocabulary to explain it better than that unfortunately.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  I’ve been using it for a while but feels pretty lite on the analytics so far, would be nice to see performance stats per page if that’s possible in a privacy friendly way.
  - markosaric 6y ago
    You mean like a page drilldown to see stats of the individual page? You can do that already. On our live demo, click on any page in the Top Pages report and the dashboard will be segmented to only show the traffic that visited that particular page.
- octopoc 6y ago
  What is Starling? I searched for it and found tons of things called that.
  - 0898 6y ago
    Sorry. Starling Bank.
iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
The site has a big re-captcha banner on it - one of Google's most consumer hostile products. They should consider switching to something else if they want to "take on google".
- sedatk 6y ago
  What’s the non-hostile alternative?
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Old-school "squiggly letters" captcha? For all the fear mongering around AI and machine learning supposedly breaking them, I'm still not aware of a general-purpose tool that would solve those out of the box without significant engineering effort.
    - spijdar 6y ago
      A general purpose tool like this one? https://github.com/PatrickLib/captcha_recognize https://github.com/PatrickLib/captcha_recognize
    - throwaway53453 6y ago
      The worry is not about ML. It's about bot farms in India/China with real people behind the wheel. That's why CAPTCHA needs to be able to evolve without maintenance from the website operator.
      - tinus_hn 6y ago
        It’s not like Googles solution is watertight.
- johnnybaptist 6y ago
  Could you explain more about what is consumer hostile about Google's re-captcha? Any recommended alternatives would be appreciated as well.
koalaman 6y ago
I read most of the article but couldn't quite find how they do analytics without tracking people. Did I miss it? How are they more privacy preserving?
- markosaric 6y ago
  This is probably a better overview of what makes Plausible a privacy-focused tool: open source, can be self-hosted, no connection to adtech, minimal data collection, no cookies, no persistent identifiers, no personal data, no cross-site/device tracking etc https://plausible.io/privacy-focused-web-analytics https://plausible.io/privacy-focused-web-analytics (I'm the co-founder)
  - warkdarrior 6y ago
    OK, so not quite privacy-preserving in the cryptographic sense, but more of a matter of degree. Plausible Analytics collects less data than Google Analytics, but not zero.
  - aabbcc1241 6y ago
    The key difference I appreciate is no cross site tracking. If I'm using a service I won't mind that service knows my traffic pattern. (That's the point of having an account on the service)
max_ 6y ago
Am I missing something? To me, analytics & privacy sound like a contradiction
- XCSme 6y ago
  It is better privacy. There's one thing for one entity to know what everyone is doing on the web, all the websites that you visit and what you do on them, and another thing for an entity to know that you visited their own website, without knowing what other websites you visit and what you do on them. LE: The best solution is still self-hosting, as hosted plausible is still a 3rd party entity that centralizes data (even though they probably don't use or share this data).
  - gdsdfe 6y ago
    but ... the website that I'm visiting have no incentive in caring about my privacy, I mean yes they should but what's in it for them ? I think this go to market approach of "we are better because google is evil" is just flawed.
    - XCSme 6y ago
      They do care, the data can be collected anonymously, without being linked directly to your person. They can use such data to improve your experience, without affecting you personally in any way.
    - lecarore 6y ago
      Well, I'm an indie Dev and I do care, I find advertising and cookie notices really annoyining and I can afford the 40 something euros a year it costs me. I don't need to track everything.
- kevincox 6y ago
  This is far too simple of a view. - For the large part the concern is what is done with the data. - Data can be anonymized. (Although this is often hard to verify) - You can hide the data in the client. For example imagine you want to know how many users use feature X. You can send an analytics report with 90% chance of a random value, and 10% chance sending the true boolean. You can't tell if any specific user has used the feature (because most likely it is a random value) but you can get a pretty good estimate what portion of your users use the feature. My understanding is that Plausible is focused on the use an anonymization.
z77dj3kl 6y ago
Seems a bit like Plausible only pays lip service to some of these ideas. Merely 5 months ago the co-founder touted here on HN about how they are "big fans of open source so wanted as permissive [a] licence as possible" [0], then promptly went and changed the license to a strongly copyleft (AGPL) a few weeks later! They might well be the next Elastic/CockroachDB/MongoDB/etc. Or better yet, they might do the classic bait-and-switch later on: get developer buy in with a good story about openness, then once they'd gotten enough of a customer (aka dev) share, do the switch. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700565
- markosaric 6y ago
  What's wrong with AGPL that doesn't fit with our ideas? We were on the MIT first and got into a situation where a large corporation wanted to take our code and resell it to tens of thousands of their customers and they made it clear they didn't want to contribute anything back to our project whatsoever. We are a two person team putting our own time and savings into this and it could have instantly killed the project and the chance of becoming sustainable. We changed the license and that was a simple way to stop them without changing our principles/ideas. Could have gone proprietary too at that stage but we didn't. Everything is clearly explained here https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
    > What's wrong with AGPL that doesn't fit with our ideas? Absolutely nothing. That person doesn't know what they're talking about. I am sorry to hear that you learned about the peril of a permissive license in the way you did, but I'm happy that you switched to strong copyleft. Arguments demanding permissive licensing instead of strong copyleft amount to saying "but then how will I stand on your neck?" You shouldn't have to put up with that.
  - Daho0n 6y ago
johnghanks 6y ago
This is literally an ad.
CobrastanJorji 6y ago
> For a website that has 10,000 visitors per month, in one year you could save about 4.5 kilograms of CO2 emissions just by replacing Google analytics with Plausible. What the hell? How do you calculate this figure? That's roughly equivalent to the CO2 created by driving a gas-burning car 10 feet to the data center to ferry information about each request (figuring a car emits about 1.2 pounds of CO2 per mile traveled). That's an astounding claim, and there's no effort to even explain the idea behind it.
- seoaeu 6y ago
  I mean 10k requests/second seems quite achievable for a single server. And I'd totally believe that 12 seconds of compute (per year!) wouldn't use much energy. In reality those requests would be intermixed with millions more for other sites and the servers would be running continuously, but the resources attributable to an individual site should be the same.
  - CobrastanJorji 6y ago
    I mean, let's think about this a bit. The US generated about 4.13 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2019, and that generation emitted about 1.72 billion metric tons of CO2, or about 0.92 pounds of CO2 per kWh (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php). Let's assume Google gets their power at that rate (which is unfair to Google because they claim to use 100% renewable energy, but I don't want to get into that). A typical server rack might use anywhere from maybe 5-50 kWh. Let's say Google has really beefy ones that consume 100 kWh per hour. That's 92 pounds of CO2 per hour. For the 12 seconds you mentioned, that's still only 0.011 kilograms of total CO2 used. And the claim is that they're BETTER by 4.5 kilograms. They've gotta be talking about some other expense than the server. But what sort of expense? The cost to build a server? Something about general maintenance of the Internet? ISPs between clients and the server?
- aimor 6y ago
  It's a point from the plausible.io website and sales pitch. https://plausible.io/lightweight-web-analytics https://plausible.io/lightweight-web-analytics The file size savings is 44.3 kB per visitor, which over 120,000 visits is 5 GB per year. The Website Carbon Calculator uses a ratio of 1.8 kWh per GB of data transferred, and 475 g CO2 generated per kWh. https://www.websitecarbon.com/ https://www.websitecarbon.com/ 44.3 kB per visit * 120,000 visits per year * 1.8 kWh per GB * 475 g CO2 per kWh = 4.5 kg per year after fixing units. "These numbers are all estimates but you can imagine if millions of website owners and Google Analytics users end up making a similar reduction in their website size too. The total reduction in the carbon footprint of the web would be immense."
frakkingcylons 6y ago
I feel like the title should be Taking on Google Analytics. Everyone associates Google with search, not so much website analytics. This title makes me think there’s someone trying to unseat their position in search.
- ganeshkrishnan 6y ago
  Google analytics is the wrong end of Google. Sure you can get few customers now and then who love privacy and will ditch GA. But for most, GA is how Google ads knows how to calculate conversions. People who want to use Google ads (which are everywhere) have to use GA. If you are not using Google Ads, I dont think Google cares much about your site anyway.
  - winrid 6y ago
    You don't have to, use GA with ads, if you go the "maximizing clicks" route. Yes, it's less accurate.
kureikain 6y ago
Anyone know how they identify the same user? All solution I know generate a unique number and put in cookie. At my app https://hanami.run https://hanami.run I don't track user and cannot know if the same users visit our website :-(. I don't want to use cookie and want to get away with GDPR. At the same time, I love to see which visitors repeatly read my website/blog and where they drop so I can optimize my site.
- marvinblum 6y ago
  Fingerprinting. That's what I do for Pirsch (https://pirsch.io/ https://pirsch.io/) and I think they do it in a similar manner. You can check out our source code here: https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch/blob/master/fingerprint.go https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch/blob/master/finge... or take a look at the Plausible repo.
  - A21z 6y ago
    Even though it may be cookieless, you won’t « get away with GDPR » with fingerprinting.
    - kureikain 6y ago
      It looks like the finger print only rely on ip/user-agent and I think ip/user-agent are ok to be stored and still GDPR compliance?
      - marvinblum 6y ago
        Everything that can be used to uniquely identify a visitor falls under the GDPR. We don't store IP addresses, so it should be GDPR compliant, but we still need to check that to make the claim.
  - kureikain 6y ago
    Oh this is really great. Thanks for that. The code is concise.
nopaintwat 6y ago
Really great to see a tech company with the motto "Don't be evil"
hoerzu 6y ago
Oh the irony. The website is protected with Google Recaptcha
- untoxicness 6y ago
  > The website is protected with Google Recaptcha Which website? The Plausible register page uses hCaptcha (https://plausible.io/register https://plausible.io/register).
Daho0n 6y ago
Plausible is still allowing DNS trickery for cross domain tracking as far as I can tell. This alone will keep us from ever trusting them. Only bad actors does this.
- lecarore 6y ago
  The analytics have no direct benefits to an individual visitor, like ads, so I get why you'd block them. I myself don't care about showing up in the analytics of the website I visit. But I pay for paisible because they are way less intrusive, and they get added to the blocklist anyway. This doesn't encourage good behaviour. From a website owner perspective, if I don't circumvent the blockers I need a server side solution. It would be equivalent privacy wise, harder to set up but less visible.
  - XCSme 6y ago
    If you try to access a service and it's down, doesn't that impact you as an individual visitor? With analytics they can know it's down. If you click a button and you get an error, doesn't it affect you if they are not notified and fix that error? If a company you like and use their products can get better and release even better and cheaper products using analytics, doesn't that bring direct benefits to you?
ElijahLynn 6y ago
Live demo of the open-source Plausible Analytics here, so you can see the HN spike! https://plausible.io/plausible.io?period=day https://plausible.io/plausible.io?period=day (39 current visitors)
lecarore 6y ago
I'm a pausible customer. They're doing pretty good work, just the basics really and that's enough. I wish they reduced their prices instead of giving 5% to charity. If I want to give to charity I'll do it myself thank you. I feel a little bit like it's just a lot of feel good marketing and barbone software I'm paying for and might churn one of those days. Maybe I'm not the only one. I have very small number of visitors to monitor and your first plan is quite far from free. It's affordable, but not for everyone.
XCSme 6y ago
> https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics#avoiding-the-adblockers https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics#avoiding-the-adbloc... For me the default uBlock origin settings do block Plausible tracking, even on a website that used their own domain name to serve the script, but I assume it was because the name was "analytics.site.com".

137 points by rapnie 6y ago

Plausible is great, and I see the need for it, but I've always enjoyed using AWStats instead, as there is no need to add third party code to my site. It all happens in the background and it paints a much better picture of your stats since users can't block the gathering of stats with an AD-Blocker.

rkagerer 6y ago
I've used AWStats for years. It's not perfect, but it's preferable to the scummy alternatives proffered by the big boys.
marvinblum 6y ago
That's one of the reasons I build Pirsch (https://pirsch.io/ https://pirsch.io/). All the JavaScript integrations can be blocked.
not_knuth 6y ago
How would you compare it to GoAcess [0]? I've only ever used GoAccess, but AWStats seems to be the older, more mature tool... so I would be curious about a comparison. [0] https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/
ukutaht 6y ago
Plausible developer here. Interesting you say that. There's no reason Plausible could not be used like AWStats. Parsing logs is just a different ingestion mechanism and we already provide self-hosting via Docker. On principle it wouldn't be too difficult to drain your logs into a Plausible instance or just run it on the same host along your web server. We ran a test last summer and found the stats from our JS-based tracker much much much more usable: https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis So this is why we haven't put too much effort in log analysis. The stats we got from AWStats were mostly bot traffic with no good way to get rid of them. Have you run AWStats and Plausible side-by-side? Do you not have ~90% bots in your logs?
- alex0401 6y ago
  JS won't ever give you an accurate number (there's a growing army of people blocking JS & trackers). Logs will provide an accurate number, albeit you may not know if it's a 100% human.

0898 6y ago

Great to see Plausible on HackerNews. It's one of the few pieces of software (Stripe is one, Starling another) that I deeply enjoy using. I get a good feeling when I open it up. I don't really have the UX vocabulary to explain it better than that unfortunately.

camjohnson26 6y ago
I’ve been using it for a while but feels pretty lite on the analytics so far, would be nice to see performance stats per page if that’s possible in a privacy friendly way.
- markosaric 6y ago
  You mean like a page drilldown to see stats of the individual page? You can do that already. On our live demo, click on any page in the Top Pages report and the dashboard will be segmented to only show the traffic that visited that particular page.
octopoc 6y ago
What is Starling? I searched for it and found tons of things called that.
- 0898 6y ago
  Sorry. Starling Bank.

iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago

The site has a big re-captcha banner on it - one of Google's most consumer hostile products. They should consider switching to something else if they want to "take on google".

sedatk 6y ago
What’s the non-hostile alternative?
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Old-school "squiggly letters" captcha? For all the fear mongering around AI and machine learning supposedly breaking them, I'm still not aware of a general-purpose tool that would solve those out of the box without significant engineering effort.
  - spijdar 6y ago
    A general purpose tool like this one? https://github.com/PatrickLib/captcha_recognize https://github.com/PatrickLib/captcha_recognize
  - throwaway53453 6y ago
    The worry is not about ML. It's about bot farms in India/China with real people behind the wheel. That's why CAPTCHA needs to be able to evolve without maintenance from the website operator.
    - tinus_hn 6y ago
      It’s not like Googles solution is watertight.
johnnybaptist 6y ago
Could you explain more about what is consumer hostile about Google's re-captcha? Any recommended alternatives would be appreciated as well.

koalaman 6y ago

I read most of the article but couldn't quite find how they do analytics without tracking people. Did I miss it? How are they more privacy preserving?

markosaric 6y ago
This is probably a better overview of what makes Plausible a privacy-focused tool: open source, can be self-hosted, no connection to adtech, minimal data collection, no cookies, no persistent identifiers, no personal data, no cross-site/device tracking etc https://plausible.io/privacy-focused-web-analytics https://plausible.io/privacy-focused-web-analytics (I'm the co-founder)
- warkdarrior 6y ago
  OK, so not quite privacy-preserving in the cryptographic sense, but more of a matter of degree. Plausible Analytics collects less data than Google Analytics, but not zero.
- aabbcc1241 6y ago
  The key difference I appreciate is no cross site tracking. If I'm using a service I won't mind that service knows my traffic pattern. (That's the point of having an account on the service)

max_ 6y ago

Am I missing something? To me, analytics & privacy sound like a contradiction

XCSme 6y ago
It is better privacy. There's one thing for one entity to know what everyone is doing on the web, all the websites that you visit and what you do on them, and another thing for an entity to know that you visited their own website, without knowing what other websites you visit and what you do on them. LE: The best solution is still self-hosting, as hosted plausible is still a 3rd party entity that centralizes data (even though they probably don't use or share this data).
- gdsdfe 6y ago
  but ... the website that I'm visiting have no incentive in caring about my privacy, I mean yes they should but what's in it for them ? I think this go to market approach of "we are better because google is evil" is just flawed.
  - XCSme 6y ago
    They do care, the data can be collected anonymously, without being linked directly to your person. They can use such data to improve your experience, without affecting you personally in any way.
  - lecarore 6y ago
    Well, I'm an indie Dev and I do care, I find advertising and cookie notices really annoyining and I can afford the 40 something euros a year it costs me. I don't need to track everything.
kevincox 6y ago
This is far too simple of a view. - For the large part the concern is what is done with the data. - Data can be anonymized. (Although this is often hard to verify) - You can hide the data in the client. For example imagine you want to know how many users use feature X. You can send an analytics report with 90% chance of a random value, and 10% chance sending the true boolean. You can't tell if any specific user has used the feature (because most likely it is a random value) but you can get a pretty good estimate what portion of your users use the feature. My understanding is that Plausible is focused on the use an anonymization.

z77dj3kl 6y ago

Seems a bit like Plausible only pays lip service to some of these ideas. Merely 5 months ago the co-founder touted here on HN about how they are "big fans of open source so wanted as permissive [a] licence as possible" [0], then promptly went and changed the license to a strongly copyleft (AGPL) a few weeks later! They might well be the next Elastic/CockroachDB/MongoDB/etc. Or better yet, they might do the classic bait-and-switch later on: get developer buy in with a good story about openness, then once they'd gotten enough of a customer (aka dev) share, do the switch. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700565

markosaric 6y ago
What's wrong with AGPL that doesn't fit with our ideas? We were on the MIT first and got into a situation where a large corporation wanted to take our code and resell it to tens of thousands of their customers and they made it clear they didn't want to contribute anything back to our project whatsoever. We are a two person team putting our own time and savings into this and it could have instantly killed the project and the chance of becoming sustainable. We changed the license and that was a simple way to stop them without changing our principles/ideas. Could have gone proprietary too at that stage but we didn't. Everything is clearly explained here https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
  > What's wrong with AGPL that doesn't fit with our ideas? Absolutely nothing. That person doesn't know what they're talking about. I am sorry to hear that you learned about the peril of a permissive license in the way you did, but I'm happy that you switched to strong copyleft. Arguments demanding permissive licensing instead of strong copyleft amount to saying "but then how will I stand on your neck?" You shouldn't have to put up with that.
- Daho0n 6y ago

johnghanks 6y ago

This is literally an ad.

CobrastanJorji 6y ago

> For a website that has 10,000 visitors per month, in one year you could save about 4.5 kilograms of CO2 emissions just by replacing Google analytics with Plausible. What the hell? How do you calculate this figure? That's roughly equivalent to the CO2 created by driving a gas-burning car 10 feet to the data center to ferry information about each request (figuring a car emits about 1.2 pounds of CO2 per mile traveled). That's an astounding claim, and there's no effort to even explain the idea behind it.

seoaeu 6y ago
I mean 10k requests/second seems quite achievable for a single server. And I'd totally believe that 12 seconds of compute (per year!) wouldn't use much energy. In reality those requests would be intermixed with millions more for other sites and the servers would be running continuously, but the resources attributable to an individual site should be the same.
- CobrastanJorji 6y ago
  I mean, let's think about this a bit. The US generated about 4.13 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2019, and that generation emitted about 1.72 billion metric tons of CO2, or about 0.92 pounds of CO2 per kWh (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php). Let's assume Google gets their power at that rate (which is unfair to Google because they claim to use 100% renewable energy, but I don't want to get into that). A typical server rack might use anywhere from maybe 5-50 kWh. Let's say Google has really beefy ones that consume 100 kWh per hour. That's 92 pounds of CO2 per hour. For the 12 seconds you mentioned, that's still only 0.011 kilograms of total CO2 used. And the claim is that they're BETTER by 4.5 kilograms. They've gotta be talking about some other expense than the server. But what sort of expense? The cost to build a server? Something about general maintenance of the Internet? ISPs between clients and the server?
aimor 6y ago
It's a point from the plausible.io website and sales pitch. https://plausible.io/lightweight-web-analytics https://plausible.io/lightweight-web-analytics The file size savings is 44.3 kB per visitor, which over 120,000 visits is 5 GB per year. The Website Carbon Calculator uses a ratio of 1.8 kWh per GB of data transferred, and 475 g CO2 generated per kWh. https://www.websitecarbon.com/ https://www.websitecarbon.com/ 44.3 kB per visit * 120,000 visits per year * 1.8 kWh per GB * 475 g CO2 per kWh = 4.5 kg per year after fixing units. "These numbers are all estimates but you can imagine if millions of website owners and Google Analytics users end up making a similar reduction in their website size too. The total reduction in the carbon footprint of the web would be immense."

frakkingcylons 6y ago

I feel like the title should be Taking on Google Analytics. Everyone associates Google with search, not so much website analytics. This title makes me think there’s someone trying to unseat their position in search.

ganeshkrishnan 6y ago
Google analytics is the wrong end of Google. Sure you can get few customers now and then who love privacy and will ditch GA. But for most, GA is how Google ads knows how to calculate conversions. People who want to use Google ads (which are everywhere) have to use GA. If you are not using Google Ads, I dont think Google cares much about your site anyway.
- winrid 6y ago
  You don't have to, use GA with ads, if you go the "maximizing clicks" route. Yes, it's less accurate.

kureikain 6y ago

Anyone know how they identify the same user? All solution I know generate a unique number and put in cookie. At my app https://hanami.run https://hanami.run I don't track user and cannot know if the same users visit our website :-(. I don't want to use cookie and want to get away with GDPR. At the same time, I love to see which visitors repeatly read my website/blog and where they drop so I can optimize my site.

marvinblum 6y ago
Fingerprinting. That's what I do for Pirsch (https://pirsch.io/ https://pirsch.io/) and I think they do it in a similar manner. You can check out our source code here: https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch/blob/master/fingerprint.go https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch/blob/master/finge... or take a look at the Plausible repo.
- A21z 6y ago
  Even though it may be cookieless, you won’t « get away with GDPR » with fingerprinting.
  - kureikain 6y ago
    It looks like the finger print only rely on ip/user-agent and I think ip/user-agent are ok to be stored and still GDPR compliance?
    - marvinblum 6y ago
      Everything that can be used to uniquely identify a visitor falls under the GDPR. We don't store IP addresses, so it should be GDPR compliant, but we still need to check that to make the claim.
- kureikain 6y ago
  Oh this is really great. Thanks for that. The code is concise.

nopaintwat 6y ago

Really great to see a tech company with the motto "Don't be evil"

hoerzu 6y ago

Oh the irony. The website is protected with Google Recaptcha

untoxicness 6y ago
> The website is protected with Google Recaptcha Which website? The Plausible register page uses hCaptcha (https://plausible.io/register https://plausible.io/register).

Daho0n 6y ago

Plausible is still allowing DNS trickery for cross domain tracking as far as I can tell. This alone will keep us from ever trusting them. Only bad actors does this.

lecarore 6y ago
The analytics have no direct benefits to an individual visitor, like ads, so I get why you'd block them. I myself don't care about showing up in the analytics of the website I visit. But I pay for paisible because they are way less intrusive, and they get added to the blocklist anyway. This doesn't encourage good behaviour. From a website owner perspective, if I don't circumvent the blockers I need a server side solution. It would be equivalent privacy wise, harder to set up but less visible.
- XCSme 6y ago
  If you try to access a service and it's down, doesn't that impact you as an individual visitor? With analytics they can know it's down. If you click a button and you get an error, doesn't it affect you if they are not notified and fix that error? If a company you like and use their products can get better and release even better and cheaper products using analytics, doesn't that bring direct benefits to you?

ElijahLynn 6y ago

Live demo of the open-source Plausible Analytics here, so you can see the HN spike! https://plausible.io/plausible.io?period=day https://plausible.io/plausible.io?period=day (39 current visitors)

lecarore 6y ago

I'm a pausible customer. They're doing pretty good work, just the basics really and that's enough. I wish they reduced their prices instead of giving 5% to charity. If I want to give to charity I'll do it myself thank you. I feel a little bit like it's just a lot of feel good marketing and barbone software I'm paying for and might churn one of those days. Maybe I'm not the only one. I have very small number of visitors to monitor and your first plan is quite far from free. It's affordable, but not for everyone.

XCSme 6y ago

> https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics#avoiding-the-adblockers https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics#avoiding-the-adbloc... For me the default uBlock origin settings do block Plausible tracking, even on a website that used their own domain name to serve the script, but I assume it was because the name was "analytics.site.com".